Good point, a lot of work really falls below the threshold where replication would still make sense. However, I do think there is a lot of incremental, pieceme

Good point, a lot of work really falls below the threshold where replication would still make sense. However, I do think there is a lot of incremental, piecemeal type of work that over the years could amount to a decent step forward. It's just that currently, from looking at the code behind quite a few published papers, the statements often just cannot be trusted enough to actually build on these works. It is my view that some subsubfields in CS sustain themselves by avoiding the most pertinent questions, because their answers would reveal that the entire subsubfield has been superseded, or was never that promising to begin with. Unfortunately, that type of noise generation is actually more profitable than a single paper saying "nope", although the value of the latter in terms of knowledge generation is enormously high.